of European states based on certain fundamental preconditions. On another, the effectuation of the standard, both by insiders and outsiders, substantiated the notion of an operative international will and enforced certain beliefs of what constituted a legitimate political community. Other conditions have appeared on the historical horizon. The monarchical principle of the
Wilson, President of the United States, and Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, were opposed in almost every other respect, but converged over the existence of this right. 48 Arendt did not disagree but she drew attention to the reshaping of the political landscape on which this right was premised. While in its republican form the state had defined the nation in terms of common citizenship in a bounded political community, post-imperial nationalist movements
he explicitly refers to France as being his country, even describing its successes and errors as his own), his sense of duty towards France makes it unambiguously clear that the General never ceased to consider himself as a member of the French political community. Accordingly, the national community invoked in the bill is bounded by the governmental, formal reading of the nation
and economic growth (and austerity) is now virtually the sole mantra of dominant political parties around the world, we argue that tracing some of the major inflections in the evolution and effects of debt as a technology of power is crucial for understanding 10 Debt as Power the “present as history” and for suggesting possible alternatives to our current trajectory. But as Mann reminds us, “ubiquity, however, is not uniformity” (2003: 3). The hierarchy, meaning, and culture of indebtedness is not static, but a fluid continuum within and between political
understood as behaviour regulated by a professional code of conduct which specified the proper ends of the profession and committed its members to deliver services according to needs in an impartial and equitable manner (Perkin 1989: xiii, 17). Married, in publicly owned and run institutions, with a strong spirit of public service, this code came to be dubbed ‘the public service ethos’, a concept which deeply permeated Labour thinking ‘about the motivation, character and moral importance of the public sector within the political community’ (Plant 2003: 561). Broadly
-humanizing gesture.38 But were the bodies of those claimed to be terrorists reduced to mere animal matter or dead meat? Here, perhaps ironically, by staging such incidents as the deaths of ‘terrorists’ who had blown themselves up, the security police attached an identity that remained essentially human, part of a political community, even if, for some, they may have been regarded as inhumane. Indeed, what has been termed here as the routine bureaucracy of death served only to reinforce the fact that these were humans. Thus, for instance, the pieces of flesh from blown-up bodies
the political arm of some dominant economic and social elites (although it can be), but a complex and even contradictory space, an ensemble of institutions balancing representative, interventionist and institutional dynamics (Jessop, 1982, 2002). The state can therefore be seen as ‘a relatively unified ensemble of socially embedded, socially regularised, and strategically selective institutions, organisations, social forces, and activities organised around (or at least involved in) making collectively binding decisions for an imagined political community’ (Jessop
perceived to be. Current research into radical movements, however, indicates the extent to which activists individually realise ethical codes and ‘personalised politics’ as part of their collective political struggles. This is most clearly argued in Paul Lichterman’s excellent The search for political community (1996) and is illustrative of the extent to which political action takes place on many different levels, increasingly based around the politics of consumption as much as the politics of production. So, just as rationality and irrationality are not clear-cut states
conception of justice in accordance with a notion of practical reason, can provide such a content. Justice and the threshold of reciprocity and generality The reason for my claim that a conception of justice is necessary in arguing for a conception of toleration is that the context in which the question of toleration between citizens arises is a context of justice: what is at issue here is the just – that is, mutually justifiable – legal and political structure for a pluralistic political community of citizens with different ethical beliefs. Claims for toleration are
urban regeneration of a desirable kind is premised on at least a partial rejection of these New Right ideas. 37 This distinction is developed further in my Community, Solidarity and Belonging, Chapter 5, and in my ‘Political community, liberal-nationalism, and the ethics of assimilation’, Ethics, 109 (1999) 261–86. 38 W. Hampton, Democracy and Community: A Study of Sheffield (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 121. 39 G. Parry, G. Moyser and N. Day, Political Participation and Democracy in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 344.